Toward Modernity

The dynasty ended in 1722 when an Afghan strongman captured Isfahan, the beautiful Safavid capital. More turbulence followed, and then another long-lived dynasty, the Qajars, took control in 1795. Winemaking went on, with any commercial production remaining almost exclusively in the hands of non-Muslims. Any exceptions were on a modest scale. A Viennese doctor named Jacob Eduard Polak, who served as Nasir al-din Shah’s physician in the mid-nineteenth century, recounts that wine drinking parties were very discrete. Unlike the Safavids, the Qajars did not drink wine with foreigners but served them sherbets instead. Doctor Polak writes that the red wine of the Kholar region of Shiraz is of high quality, very alcoholic, and consumed locally as well as exported. For his part, the doctor often prescribed wine as a medicine, once recommending it to the foreign minister, a very conservative Muslim, as a cure for his malaria. The minister balked at first but finally agreed; according to Dr. Polak, his malaria was cured, and he became an avid disciple of wine’s medicinal qualities. Dr. Polak also prescribed wine for the women in the shah’s harem, whose lives were often miserable.